The Watch List takes a look at what matches you should be watching while you’re at home and they come recommended by your favorite professional wrestling stars. WrestleZone recently spoke with Chris Dickinson, who looked back on his debut in Japan as a match that he holds in high regard.
“I grew up with a friend, his name is Lance. We met in my sophomore year of high school and he knew he loved wrestling. I was in the know more with taping trading and Japanese wrestling, video games, all of that stuff, and I needed another friend locally. The kids I backyard wrestled with, they were kinda into it but I’m a super hardcore nerd. So I needed another person like that to [share it with]. We became really close friends and we’re still best friends to this day. I show him my matches and I ask him his opinion because he was just as instrumental in me putting together the idea of the wrestler I was going to be before I was this person that I am now. Of all of the matches that I’ve ever showed him, I showed him my first match in Japan against Yuji Okabayashi from back in February and he was in tears. He was crying, and I watched that match—I hadn’t even watched the match even since I had the match—we watched it in his backyard on my phone. I often don’t say this,” Dickinson said, “there’s some matches I had that I absolutely love, but I don’t put myself over this much. This was one of those matches where I said ‘this was it’ because it was the culmination of twenty years of working my ass off and living my dream, which is to wrestle in Japan.”
“You don’t get another chance to make a first impression, you know? And I did an absolutely good job at making a good first impression with my first match in Japan. That’s also a credit to my tremendously talented opponent, who is a really, really good person too. I think that match, if you could watch one match of mine to introduce yourself to me and my work,” Dickinson said, “even though I’m constantly changing and evolving as a wrestler and I feel like I’ve gotten that much better in the last six months—if you could watch one match I would go pick up the GCW Japanese tour from February. I wrestled Yuji Okabayashi in my first match and it was a tremendous match.”
Check out Dickinson’s GCW match picks on FITE; we’ve also added some free-t0-watch full-length matches from his career below:
Brian Cage v Chris Dickinson
Beyond Wrestling Uncomfortable — June 22, 2014
Chris Dickinson vs. Kris Statlander
Beyond Wrestling Treasure Hunt — February 24, 2019
Chris Dickinson vs. Yuji Okabayashi
GCW Live Fast, Die Young — February 3, 2020
Chris Dickinson vs. Shane Mercer
GCW Acid Cup II Night 2 — March 20, 2020
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